James Truslow Adams

“ It is not necessary to exalt erring and fallible men to the rank of saints in order to show our gratitude to them or our loyalty to our country. But the leaders and citizens of Rhode Island, the martyred Quakers, and the men and women of Massachusetts and the other colonies, who so lived and wrought and died that the glory of an heritage of intellectual freedom might be ours, are the Americans whom, in the struggle we have been reciting, it should be our duty to honor. ”

“ From the beginning, they had striven to banish from the colony all ideas not in harmony with their own, and had thus lowered and impoverished the intellectual life of the community. On nearly every occasion, they had led in fanning the flames of intolerance and persecution. Over and over, they had helped to brutalize the natures of the citizens by calling for the blood of victims to whom the community would otherwise have shown mercy. One such example was yet to come, before the colony, disillusioned, was to reject their leadership finally in civil affairs. ”

“ The modern historian has come to realize that the qualities of a people, the characteristics of an epoch, the motives of a great struggle or movement, are by no means the clear-cut, sharply defined matters sketched by the patriotic writers of a simpler day. In the enormously complicated development of modern society from the struggle of class with class, the conflict of interest with interest, the clash of one element against another, it is recognized that the contest was at no time between clearly aligned forces of the powers of darkness and the powers of light. ”

“ Those who did not believe as the Puritans believed were not of the elect, and so were condemned by God to eternal torment. No act of intolerance shown toward them by the Puritans could thus compare with the almost unthinkable intolerance displayed toward them by the author of their being. To show toleration or mercy toward such was, logically, to exalt humanity above the deity.
To the Puritan, the reign of law was merely the reign of God’s will, but it was universal. No act was indifferent, either in the universe or in the individual. ”

“ His gentle spirit, humble seeking of ever more light, and broad tolerance of mind, shone almost alone in that period of intolerant dogmatism and persecuting zeal, alike of Churchman and Puritan. “We ought,” he wrote, “to be firmly persuaded in our hearts of the truth, and goodness of the religion, which we embrace in all things; yet as knowing ourselves to be men, whose property it is to err and to be deceived in many things; and accordingly both to converse with men in that modesty of mind, as always to desire to learn something better, or further, by them, if it may be.” ”

“ It has been evident from the foregoing narrative that the power of the clergy had been felt in every sphere of the colony's life. In the pulpits, in the schools, in the colleges, in the censorship of the press, in the legislature, even in the councils of war and the courts of justice, their influence had been incalculable. The story of the struggle against it, and of its gradual yielding to defeat, as the people more and more made good their right to believe as they would and live their lives as they chose, has occupied many of our pages. ”

“ Man, in the individual treatment of his fellow, is, indeed, bound by the laws of justice and of right; but in the larger processes of history we are confronted by problems that the ethics of the individual fail to solve. The Indian in the American forest, and the Polynesian in his sunny isle, share, in the moral enigma of their passing, the mystery of the vanished races of man and brute, which have gone down in the struggle for existence in geological or historic ages, in what, one would fain believe, is a universe governed by moral law. ”

“ It had been growing steadily narrower and more intolerant, more insistent upon the extirpation of every idea, religious or political, that disturbed its own control over the minds and lives of men. Unfortunately, at the very time when new power for evil was thus being placed in its hands by the action of the synod and the General Court, the more conservative leaders, both of Massachusetts and Connecticut, were lost to their communities by death, and the dangerous weapons were to be wielded by two of the most bigoted and blood-thirsty fanatics whom either Old or New England had produced. ”

“ It was scriptural, and it was to the Scriptures that every Puritan turned to ascertain the will of God upon every detail of daily life. This obviously opened the way to the most far-reaching tyranny to which men could be called upon to submit, should those fanatically holding the view be in possession of the civil power to enforce it. The tyranny of political despotism had left untouched the whole vast field of private conduct, save in so far as the acts of individuals might minister directly to the despot’s pleasure, wealth, or power. ”

“ The opinion of a clergyman, therefore, is of no more value than that of the well-informed layman, with his broader practical experience of life, if, indeed, of as much. One does, however, have recourse to a specialist, and a banker’s opinion is sought on finance, and a doctor’s on health. As, according to Puritan theory, there was no act which was not of a religious or moral character, the clergyman was, so say, a specialist on one aspect of everything, and from that standpoint his advice must be sought in every detail of life, and his influence was correspondingly great. ”

“ If the Empire were not to be a source of great military weakness, and if the Navigation Acts, upon which its commercial power rested, were to be properly enforced, it was obvious that a much greater degree of administrative unity and control would have to be realized. In particular, the granting of the charters, in which no provision had been made for a royal governor or for any definite channel of communication between the imperial government and the colony, had undoubtedly been a serious administrative blunder, which the attitude of Massachusetts had made at once worse and more obvious. ”

“ Humanity, in their eyes, was so utterly an evil thing, that only by an undeserved act of the grace of God was it possible that even a few human beings could possibly do anything pleasing in his sight.
This is not an ideal which can permanently satisfy man's whole nature or exert complete influence over him. It is a far cry back to the Greek picture of the perfect life as the fullest development of the entire man, body and soul. Whether that may not properly be a Christian ideal also is not to be discussed here, but it is toward some such ideal of self-expression that the ordinary man strives. ”

“ Everywhere along the edge of the world, traders and settlers were being tossed on those stormy political waters, where met the new tides of imperial ambition, fast flowing to the farthest confines of the new-found seas. ”

“ The genius of New England has never been military. Her people, in a cause in which they believe, can fight doggedly and well, but she has never given to the nation a great soldier, either as leader or organizer, and King Philp’s War presented no exception. From its nature, it was less a war than a series of raids by the savages and retaliatory expeditions by the English; but it was the only sort of war which the colonies could have expected, or for which they ought to have been prepared. ”

“ Once allow the body of men professing such doctrine to dominate public opinion, or control the machinery of government, and there would evidently be no limit to their deadly influence upon freedom of intellect as well as of action. It is not a question of the personal morality of its professors or of the nobility of their motives. Without the vital idea of development, both would slowly harden into mere forms and empty professions, while the human mind would lie shackled, debarred from seeking new truth, or from making those experiments which alone bring about healthy growth. ”

“ We do not wish to convey the impression that the leaders of the colony were animated by mere love of power or a vulgar ambition, strong though the former was in most of them. But the danger to the liberties of their subjects was no less great because Winthrop and Cotton were wholly convinced of the divine nature of their mission. It is too frequently assumed that despotic acts are necessarily those of a self-conscious despot; whereas, in most cases, they are merely the readiest means employed for reaching ends which authority may think itself rightly privileged, or morally bound, to attain. ”

“ Like so many modern theories which consider the state as all, and the individual as nothing, it made the blunder of treating the abstraction as human, and the human as an abstraction. It asked too much of the individual, and, entirely apart from selfish motives, which were found in the colonies quite as much as in the mother-country, it almost of necessity subordinated the interests of the former to those of the latter. The success of the Empire as a whole was doubtless far more dependent upon the strength and prosperity of England than upon the fortunes of any individual colony ”

“ When we speak of liberty in connection with this early struggle with the home country, we should realize clearly that the party opposed to England fought to the end to perpetuate religious intolerance, and the intrenched privilege of a minority to tax an unenfranchised majority four times as numerous, and for the right to concentrate all political power in the hands of one religious sect. The clergy, who had wielded an extraordinary influence in the counsels of this governing minority, had, in many instances, been men of marked ability and fanatically devoted to the truth as they saw it. ”

“ THE DEFEAT OF THE THEOCRACY The same decade and a half, the political events of which we traced in the last chapter, was to witness also religious movements of utmost importance. The firm establishment of the government of Rhode Island, based upon religious liberty, and the preservation of the independence of that colony and of its democratic neighbor, Connecticut, were matters of profound import in the political and intellectual life of America. Not less so was the struggle between the leaders of the theocracy and the growing liberalism of the people of Massachusetts. ”

“ The great trans-oceanic empires which were attempted in the seventeenth century by the leading European powers were political phenomena of an absolutely new type. Neither the colonies of the city-states of Greece, nor the slow continental expansion of Rome offered any adequate parallel to the political results of the age of discovery, or any solutions of the problems created. [3] Of those new empires, the English not only has proved the most lasting and the greatest, but has secured, from its very beginning, the largest comparative amount of freedom to the colonists. ”

“ The extraordinary energy of the new period, facing an entire globe to be appropriated and exploited, rapidly developed national spirit into imperial ambition, and the old ideas and practices of a small and legally restricted commerce had to be suddenly adapted and enlarged to meet a situation unprecedented in history. The surprising fact is not that, in so many ways, the theory and practice of empire-making should have contained errors and worked injustices, but that one which, after all, proved highly successful, should have been developed so immediately and so surely. ”

“ What the English government granted was a charter by which the colony took her natural place, indeed, in an empire without whose protection she was defenseless, but which, at the same time, gave to her citizens a degree of self-government and political freedom which the theocratic group would never have been willing to concede. The substitution of a moderate property qualification for the franchise, in place of any other whatsoever, at once placed the colony abreast of the most liberal political thought of the day; while local self-government was restored in the form of a popular assembly. ”